Isla ended up just off the North Carolina Outer Banks as Hurricane Florence approached the state in mid-September. “We are tracking a leatherback sea turtle as Hurricane Florence approaches. She appears to be responding to the much larger waves (~14ft) and has begun moving southeast into deeper water,” the organization explained in a tweet.

The next day, Sept. 14, Florida Leatherbacks tweeted that Isla “has stopped moving south and is now about 65 miles off Kitty Hawk North Carolina in 120 ft water. She will be experiencing high surf for the next 48 hours.”

Martin told IFLScience, “Sea turtles evolved with hurricanes so for the most part, they are designed to handle the effects of weather.”

“Often times, the biggest impact we see is to nests that are still incubating on beaches. If a storm causes flooding or beach erosion, this can impact nests,” she told the website.

Marine Turtle Research Group director Kate Mansfield, at the University of Central Florida, told Popular Science she thinks large turtles will dive below the surface to avoid storms.

“I have tracked turtles through some storms in the past and never saw any sort of movement that suggested they were trying to get away from the storm (or that the storms shifted their paths). The turtles I tracked were larger juveniles—at that size they can dive 100s of meters deep,” she explained, according to Popular Science.

Isla the #leatherback is still moving north and is now off the coast of Virginia, USA. Since #hurricaneflorence has passed, she has been staying in cooler and deeper (>150') water. In this image showing sea surface temperature, you can see the cooler wake the storm left behind. pic.twitter.com/RnC15WJniQ